The project brings together data from across Alaska and Canada. Map by ACCS.

Webinar: Mapping the Human Footprint Across the Boreal

Marcus Geist, Alaska Center for Conservation Science

The Alaska Center for Conservation Science (ACCS) at the University of Alaska Anchorage, in partnership with the Northwest Boreal Landscape Conservation Cooperative (NWB LCC), embarked on a project to map and quantify the human footprint across interior Alaska and northwestern Canada.

The goal was to build a seamless dataset that spanned international boundaries by stitching source information from state, provincial and territorial entities in order to represent landscape intactness in the boreal ecosystem. This dataset, which focuses primarily on historical mining, oil and gas, and transportation infrastructure, could help inform decisions regarding natural resource monitoring, identifying potential mitigation/restoration sites, and for conservation planning at watershed scales.

Abstact:
The Alaska Fire Science Consortium (AFSC) is a boundary organization that works across the science-management interface to enhance the role that scientific information plays in decision-making for fire management in Alaska. We conducted a case study of AFSC to examine how they facilitate the delivery, development, and application of climate and related information and to determine the outcomes of their work. Specifically, this talk will outline the evolution of AFSC to examine how the activities they use to deliver science and facilitate new research development, their engagement with climate science information, and the outcomes of their work change over time.

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The dataset brings together data from several sources across Alaska and Canada. Map by ACCS.

Understanding the current, and historical, extent of human development is an important component to effectively managing ecosystems. The Alaska Center for Conservation Science at the University of Alaska Anchorage, in partnership with the Northwest Boreal Landscape Conservation Cooperative, embarked on a project to map and quantify the human footprint across interior Alaska and northwestern Canada and are happy to share this new information.

A webinar will be held on October 4th to present the data and process. Details on how to join are available here:http://nwblcc.org/?p=2436

The goal was to build a seamless dataset that spanned state, provincial and territorial boundaries to represent an initial look at intactness in the boreal ecosystems of western Canada and Alaska. This builds off work done by Ducks Unlimited Canada to bring together information from the Yukon, Northwest Territories, and British Columbia.

The data are available at the ACCS website.

Habitat loss and fragmentation are the leading causes of species loss globally, and although Alaska is thought to be 95% intact (Trammell and Aisu 2015), the location and intensity can have important impacts on local and regional resources. However, a detailed, comprehensive dataset showing human development has yet to be created for the state of Alaska. We expect these datasets can inform numerous resource and land managers decisions including:

Choose where to initiate or continue biological, chemical, and ecological monitoring

We anticipate that these datasets will help guide scenario planning efforts within and beyond the boreal ecosystem of Alaska, the Yukon Territory, and parts of the Northwest Territories and British Columbia.

The team spent significant effort on developing a comprehensive dataset defining mining’s footprint across the region. Historically, mines have been depicted by point locations which do not convey their relative sizes or mining activity might be represented by claims polygons which overestimate their actual footprints. With the advent of statewide 2.5 meter ortho-imagery, ACCS embarked on project to digitize visible surface disturbance related to historic and current mining. Nearly 2000 source point locations were evaluated from the US Geologic Survey, British Columbia Ministry of Energy and Mines, and the Yukon Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources.

The mining footprint dataset includes over 650 discrete polygons totaling 1200 square kilometers with a mean size of 1.8 sq kms. The measured mining footprints have been summarized at the watershed (USGS HUC10 – mean area 688 sq kms) scale across Alaska and summarized at the coarse scale, sub-sub drainage unit (mean area 16,000 sq kms) within Canada. This dataset could help inform decisions regarding natural resource monitoring, identifying potential mitigation/restoration sites, and for conservation planning at watershed scales.

Additional human footprint datasets include a comprehensive transportation layer incorporating roads, trails, rails, and airports across the NWB LCC as well as and energy layer and a developed landcover layer.

DATA CONTACT: If you have updated data and would like to incorporate your information into this footprint, please contact Marcus Geist at mageist (at) alaska.edu or 907-786-6325.

WHY: The Alaska Climate Science Center and the Northwest Boreal LCC expressed a need for landscape scale datasets which can be used for habitat modeling, connectivity evaluations, and a means to more fully measure cumulative impacts.

The Yukon River Basin (YRB), underlain by discontinuous permafrost, has experienced a warming climate over the last century that has altered air temperature, precipitation, and permafrost. A collaborative effort between the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council (YRITWC) and the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the Indigenous Observation Network (ION) has developed two projects that focus on water quality and permafrost research. More than 300 community environmental technicians have been trained to participate in ION by effectively monitoring and investigating their local environments with global implications. These local observations, obtained over the past decade, have contributed to the global understanding of climate change and ultimately its impacts on Alaska Native Villages. Combined with historical data from the USGS, the ION database now covers over 30 years of historical water quality data in key locations. Trend analysis of this database suggests increased active layer expansion, weathering and sulfide oxidation due to permafrost degradation throughout the YRB. Changing geochemistry of the YRB may have important implications for the carbon cycle, aquatic ecosystems, and contaminant transport. With predicted environmental changes, the efforts of ION and the integration of Indigenous knowledge will become critical to assess, mitigate and adapt to changing local environments.

The Inuvialuit of the Yukon North Slope have formed a Wildlife Advisory Council, a co-management body, comprised of federal, territorial, and Inuvialuit representatives, and they are working closely with researchers from the Round River Organization to develop a management plan that reflects how the Inuvialuit use Arctic resources and their understanding of seasonal habitat use by fish and wildlife. This process for integrating Traditional and Western science in the Inuvialuit Settlement Area will provide an important example for how other scientists and managers can work with native communities to fulfill the need for wildlife and management plans in other places.

Researchers reviewed existing local knowledge publications and recorded information from local workshops and interviews to develop detailed maps and descriptions habitat for caribou, moose, grizzly and polar bears, Dolly Varden Char, Broad Whitefish, geese, muskox and Dall’s sheep. Changes in distribution patterns and impacts from climate change have also been observed, especially for caribou. These changes include different migration routes and timing of migration. A report describing the knowledge gathered was submitted to the communities for review and use in the next phase of developing the management plan. The Inuvialuit Traditional Knowledge of Wildlife Habitat on the Yukon North Slope final report can be viewed here:

The analysis explores when and where disabled ships are likely to go ashore in a modeled environment.

A webinar discussing an ongoing analysis of simulated disabled ship drift dynamics was held on Tuesday, August 22. Ben Matheson presened work supported by the Aleutian and Bering Sea Islands LCC, as well as Wildlife Conservation Society and Genwest.
Understanding the risks of potential vessel groundings along four major traffic lanes through the Aleutian Islands on the Great Circle Route.

In recent years emerging routes through the Bering Strait and Chukchi Sea have drawn significant international attention because of expected new traffic resulting from decreased seasonal sea ice. However, the vast majority of international vessel traffic in Alaska actually transits through the southern Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands via the Great Circle Route. Within this high use route (9-12 vessels per day), there is a potential risk of vessel incidents that might result in oil spills and subsequent impacts.

These spills have the potential to harm key regional subsistence species like marine mammals, birds and fish/shellfish. They also pose grave potential risk to commercial fisheries both in terms of direct impacts and also potential harm to market dynamics based on perceived contamination of commercial species of fish and shellfish. Using information on predominant local winds, surface currents, and the shape and buoyancy of a simulated tanker vessel we were able to run thousands of simulated vessel drift events using the General NOAA Operational Modeling Environment (GNOME) model. We will share results of this drift modeling effort relative to risks posed to Steller Sea Lions and seabird colonies in the Aleutian Islands. This work is a preliminary modelling effort that can be expanded in the future.

“Supporting the Earth Science Community through Holistic Data Management Approaches”

Presenter: Rob Bochenek, Axiom Data Science

This talk will describe the end-to-end cyber infrastructure developed to support stakeholders in the earth science community throughout the data lifecycle: from immediately after data collection, through numerical analysis and synthesis, visualization, and decision making, to data publication and reuse.

Over the last decade, Axiom Data Science has worked with state, federal, NGO, univeristy and private partners to develop the technologies and capabilities necessary to address many of the common challenges to data management, reuse, and visualization, including securely storing and sharing data within research teams and larger research campaigns; providing tools for scientists to perform reproducible analytical workflows; publishing data with standards-compliant metadata; assimilating and visualizing data in ways that allow data of heterogeneous types and spatiotemporal granularities to be be integrated, explored, and understood together; and efficiently accessing and analyzing high-volume data products including model results and satellite imagery. By integrating these capabilities, we have created an end-to-end data ecosystem that provides scientists with tools for meeting their data management obligations and performing collaborative analyses using reproducible workflows. The resulting system augments the impact, reuse, and accessibility of science research products by making them available to decision makers and other interested stakeholders alongside other observational, in situ, remote, and real time data products from other research and monitoring efforts.

A 3-day workshop will take place beginning in Fairbanks on September 12, 2017 to discuss the ecology and management of aspen in Alaska’s Interior. The rest of the workshop will take place in the field between Fairbanks and Tok. Please see the program information on the registration form for details. A formal agenda will be published on the SAF website in the coming weeks.

Registration forms and payment due August 25th: $75 to cover transportation and one meal. (If you can only attend the Fairbanks portion, we ask for a $20 registration to cover transportation to the field.)

The U.S. National Vegetation Classification (USNVC) is currently the least complete in Alaska. An Alaska workshop, held in January 2011, initiated drafts of mid-level USNVC types (the division, macrogroup and group), with subsequent revisions by Alaskan ecologists in 2015 2016. But there has been no systematic development of alliances and associations in boreal and arctic Alaska, despite a wide range of published materials on fine-scale plant community types (e.g., Viereck and company, Alaska Natural Heritage Program/Alaska Center for Conservation Science, pers. comm. 2012). Pacific coastal types are better developed, and have been completed in consultation with Alaska, British Columbia, and lower 48 ecologists.

What is now needed is to invite a rigorous peer review of the existing macrogroups and groups, and to establish a peer-review based process for developing alliances and associations, in collaboration with the Ecological Society of America’s NVC Review Board (which is authorized to conduct the review on behalf of the Federal Geographic Data Committee, Vegetation Subcommittee). We have now formally established the NVC Review Board, and would like to engage Alaskan ecologists in improving the USNVC for Alaska. Our workshop will also guide the development of LANDFIRE products. LANDFIRE is preparing to conduct a second round of national mapping, beginning in 2018, using both USNVC Groups and NatureServe Ecological Systems. LANDFIRE will use these classification revisions to improve the Map Legend concepts.

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